5 min read

Getting Advertisers with an Outbound Campaign

Sarah Wheeler
Sarah Wheeler
Updated on
March 22, 2022
Best Practices

After building your ad platform, the next step is acquiring advertisers. One way to do this is launching an outbound strategy, where you create interest by reaching out cold to potential advertisers.

This is relevant for nearly all ad platforms. Even if you are a marketplace or have a retail media platform, advertisers won’t necessarily flock to you. You’ll still need to contact the right decision makers to initiate testing your ad platform’s ROI.

This article outlines the tools, resources, and steps for getting your outbound campaigns started.

Identify your ad platform’s unique value proposition

First and foremost, you must understand your own ad product. Educate yourself on the logistics, features, and implementation of it. Know your targeting, reporting, and self-serve offerings, as well as any key differentiators in the market.

Consider why someone would care. What makes your ad product special? Why would someone spend ad money with you rather than Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.?

Use this information throughout the process.

Define your ideal customer

Similarly, identify your target market. For retailers, it might be vendors and merchants you already work with. Define what brands you’d ideally like as advertisers. You may look first for companies who have similar target audiences as yours. A marketplace, for example, might target their own vendors first. We recommend creating an ideal customer persona before sending your first email.

Chairish self-serve

Marketplace example. Their ideal advertisers are their vendors.

Craft your messaging

After understanding your product and its relevance to your target advertisers, write your messaging. It must resonate with your audience if you want a response. Remember - there are plenty of other ad platforms out there; you must find a way to stand out.

One piece of advice: good advertisers know their target market. Speak to how your ad platform connects them with that audience and what their potential ROI.

As you then start reaching out to prospects, make sure you test and iterate as needed. Try coming up with 3-5 email subjects. Which ones drive opens? What about response rates? Use this data to hone in on the right message you need to scale.

Gather your tools

Outbound is a numbers game. If you want to reach out to hundreds or thousands of potential advertisers, you need tools to help automate and track these campaigns.

Below are some helpful SaaS tools you could use for outbounding:

  • CRM - This keeps all of your companies, deals, etc. organized. Use this to track who you have reached out to, if they’ve responded, and any successes. Hubspot and Salesforce are two popular options.
  • Email sourcing - You’ll need a resource like ZoomInfo for gathering names, titles, organizations, and email addresses so you know who to contact in cold emails. You can also use this for pulling phone numbers for cold calls.
  • Video tools - Adding personalized videos to your outbound emails can increase your response rates. Vidyard or Loom are good options here.
  • Website de-anonymization - Tools like Clearbit help you understand what companies are visiting your “Advertise with Us” page. This is a great audience to reach out to in earnest, as they have already expressed some interest.
  • LinkedIn Sales Navigator - This is helpful for following companies and individual prospects and send personalized messaging. Emails can be overwhelming–relevant LinkedIn messages can allow for greater personalization and might be more likely to be clicked on.
Zoominfo

Hire your team

You’ll need to dedicate resources to executing your outbound vision. If you’re starting out, this sales role could be handled by anyone: the PM involved, ad operations, a solo salesperson, and so on (see our article here about the needed hats to launch an ad platform).

As you scale, however, you may want to build an entire team focused on outbounding and growing your advertiser base.

Your outbound team could also partner with your marketing department to pair emails with paid spend targeting the same companies/people you are outreaching to. LinkedIn will be the top option here, but you can also do company targeting on Facebook using Clearbit Ads.

Begin!

Once you’ve gathered your messaging, tools, and team, it’s time to get started. A typical day for your outbound sales team will include:

  • Researching potential advertisers
  • Brainstorming sequences specific to those advertisers
  • Defining who at those companies you’ll contact
  • Sending sequences / nurture emails to prospects
  • Cold calling
  • Analyzing data from web traffic, email open rates, etc.
  • Sending messages through LinkedIn
  • Creating videos for extra personalization
  • Collaborating with larger sales/marketing team

There’s a lot to do, and there’s always more you can do to engage with prospects. Remember the basic strategy: test, measure, and refine.

Conclusion

Launching an outbound strategy can be challenging. It requires one key characteristic: persistence. You will often be ignored and hear “no” frequently. Don’t give up! Focus your efforts on structure and strategy, not results. It takes time to know what messaging resonates and how to connect your product with your audience. Keep it up!

About Kevel

Kevel offers the infrastructure APIs needed to quickly build custom ad platforms for sponsored listings, internal promotions, native ads, and more - so you can drive new revenue and take back the Internet.

We are committed to the vision that every online retailer and publisher should be able to add user-first ad revenue streams and take back the Internet from Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Customers like Ticketmaster, Yelp, Strava, Mozilla, and many more have already launched successful ad platforms on Kevel.

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